Guess there’s not a bad place to take a nap, eh?
Next time you are about to tell someone that you “slept like a log,” feel free to exchange the phrase with “slept like a bison calf on hot pavement.” You might get some strange looks, but you wouldn’t be lying. Based upon this video from Good Bull Guided (a wildlife photography tour that primarily runs in Rocky Mountain National Park), the side of the road is as good of a place as any to take a quick snooze when you are a baby bison.
Most of the time with animals (and with humans), there’s a process of growing up, where you have to be guided around and taken care of for a lot of your younger years. You have to spend time learning the ropes, how things work, and what to do and not to do.
Parents of animals in the wild usually raise them until they are able to survive on their own, and then they let them go out into the world and figure things out for themselves. The parenting process for bison generally lasts about six months, and it’s at that point that a bison mother will start to wean off her young and move them to grazing (female calves can sometimes take a little bit longer to become independent).
And keeping up with the herd can be hard work for bison calves. Sure, they’ve got a lot more youthful energy than their elders, but every step that a fully grown bison takes is probably the equivalent of two or three steps for a bison calf (depending on their size). So it makes sense that a young bison might need to take a nap in order to keep up… and according to this video, it doesn’t matter where that nap takes place:
“Bison calf taking a nap on the warm pavement.”
Cool to see what we presume is the bison parent carefully watching over its calf while also grazing a bit. All parents know that you’ve got to be able to multitask with a young one running around.
The young bison evidently chose the side of the road to nap because of the heat that’s captured and thus given off by the pavement. Calves don’t have as thick of coats as their adult herd mates, so this little one might have been doing all it could to stay warm while it rested its eyes for a couple of minutes.
Hopefully the calf was able to get some good rest before the group got on the move again. It seemed to be a little startled when it lifted its head up. Though I’m no expert on napping… anytime that happens to me after a nap, it usually means it was a good one. And social media users couldn’t get enough of the footage:
“Mama not going far away, that’s for sure.”
“Poor thing is tired.”
“Protecting our babies at all costs is instinctual.”
“So cute.”
“What a beautiful scene.”
Yeah… all outdoors videos don’t have to be life and death. Sometimes, a good nap will suffice.
